American Experiment (202 page)

The turning point for Washington came with a speech he gave in Atlanta in 1895. At a time when almost half of American blacks were illiterate, he urged schooling and more schooling. Speaking to a racially mixed audience, he in effect proposed a great transaction—that blacks acquiesce in social subordination and political inequality in exchange for economic opportunity and advancement; in time, the latter would end the former. Agitating “questions of social equality,” he said, was the “extremest folly.” His message—learn, work, earn, win respect—won a chorus of praise from Southern whites and many blacks.

Washington himself rose to great social eminence, dining (once) with the Roosevelts in the White House, receiving audiences with kings, consorting with philanthropists like Carnegie and Rockefeller. He gained political power too, as he used his Tuskegee work as a base for the “Tuskegee machine”—a personal political organization through which he placed hundreds of blacks in governmental and academic posts throughout the nation. He offered advice to Roosevelt and Taft, in exchange for which he muted criticism of their treatment of blacks. But when Taft left office, Washington’s patronage power left with him.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois seemed almost a polar opposite to Washington—born of an established mulatto family in western Massachusetts, graduate of Fisk University, student for two years at the University of Berlin, the first Negro to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard (for a notable thesis on the African slave trade). He moved on to an illustrious career as a sociologist, historian, and novelist. With success, however, Du Bois became more and more militant. He could not accept Washington’s brokerage and accommodationism. On the death of his first son, Du Bois buried his anguish in anger: “Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.”

Du Bois came to oppose virtually everything Washington stood for. He chose militancy over cooperation, protest over patronage, black and trade-union resistance over endless deference. At a demonstration at Harpers Ferry, he and his fellow militants, in what Du Bois called some of the plainest English ever spoken by American blacks (Du Bois used the words Negro, black, and colored interchangeably, sometimes in the same sentence), demanded immediate full mankind suffrage, the end of segregation in railways and streetcars, the right “as freemen” for Negroes to walk, talk, and socialize with whites as well as blacks, and the enforcement of laws against rich as well as poor, capitalist as well as laborer, white as well as black. After two blacks were lynched and scores burned out of their homes and stores in Springfield, Illinois, forty-nine white progressives and socialists issued a “call” that gave birth to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Du Bois was the only black among its first set of top officers.

Conflict intensified between the militants and accommodationists. Washington fought the NAACP and Du Bois with bribery and espionage, and Du Bois responded with burning attacks on the Tuskegee machine. Both sides sought to control black organizations, the Niagara Movement founded by Du Bois, the NAACP, the black press, access to white philanthropy. In place of Washington’s transactional leadership—which ultimately might have served as a crucial transitional leadership—Du Bois proposed black struggle in the United States and in Asia and Africa and the “islands of the sea.”

And off to the side stood the most extraordinary leader of all, Mary Harris Jones. Above all an individualist with a dislike for doctrine, Mother Jones had one simple strategy—to travel hundreds of miles to help whatever children, women, or men needed help, whether child laborers, persecuted Wobblies, jailed union leaders, women garment workers on the picket lines. This simply dressed, grandmotherly-looking woman
symbolized the capacity of women leaders, to a far greater extent than men leaders of the time, to transcend small differences and unite behind humane, progressive goals. It was grimly ironic that the cadre of leaders best equipped for the struggle to broaden democracy in America were the very ones who, with their female constituencies, were denied the stoutest democratic weapon to extend democracy, the right to vote.

“I KNOW HISTORY ISN’T T
hrue, Hinissy, because it ain’t what I see ivry day on Halsted Sthreet,” said Mr. Dooley, the ruminative barkeep. Historians were like doctors, he went on, either making the wrong diagnosis or making postmortem examinations. The latter type “tells ye what a counthry died iv. But I’d like to know what it lived iv.”

If life and action and excitement were what Finley Peter Dunne’s favorite bartender was wanting, he could find them in turn-of-the-century Chicago, and in the nation during what came to be known as the progressive era stretching from the mid-nineties to World War I. And if these were retrogressive times as well as progressive, of “intriguing interplay” of old and new ideas, in Lewis Gould’s words, it was also one of the most creative and innovative periods in the nation’s history.

Nothing had symbolized the past and the future better than the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. On the lakeside, a dreary stretch of plain and swamp had been transformed into a site for gleaming white buildings of shimmering domes, lofty arches, and Greek columns. The Queen of Spain sent reproductions of the
Niña, Pinta,
and
Santa Maria.
Models of primitive ships and trains stood side by side with those of grand Pullmans and ocean liners. Alexander Graham Bell opened the New York–Chicago telephone circuit. For the 12 million visitors who entered the Court of Honor, the fair was “the first popular demonstration of the beauty of orderliness, of proper proportions, of classical lines”—a demonstration that would influence American architecture, furniture, and decoration for years to come. Even Henry Adams was impressed.

The fair, it was said, helped bring into vogue Charles Dana Gibson’s black-and-white drawings of the tall, aristocratic, smartly dressed woman and the square-jawed, clean-shaven, well-groomed young man—drawings that put the Gibson girls up in rude mining cabins and helped take mustaches off men of fashion. Women’s fashions were changing too. The turn of the century brought a “shirtwaist vogue” duly recorded by the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
The new fashions, however, had to accommodate another vogue—bicycling. The dangerous early “wheels,” consisting of a huge hoop topped by a saddle and connected by a curved backbone to a tiny rear wheel, had given way to two wheels of equal size, but skirts were
raised and split a bit to prevent entanglement with gears and spokes

Bicycles were but one phase in the ceaseless quest for ever new forms of transportation. The Sears, Roebuck catalogue of 1900 carried sixty-seven pages of ads for buggies, harnesses, saddles, and the like, but already hansoms, victorias, sulkies, phaetons, and buggies were giving way to electric “runabouts” and gasoline-fueled cars. And in December 1903 the Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot
ran a headline across the front page,
FLYING MACHINE SOARS 3 MILES IN TEETH OF HIGH WIND OVER SAND HILLS
, with a subhead explaining
NO BALLOON ATTACHED TO AID IT.
The Pennsylvania Railroad launched the “fastest long-distance train in the world,” eighteen hours between New York and Chicago.

By 1900, Americans could boast that they produced more than half the world’s cotton, corn, copper, and oil; more than a third of its steel, pig iron, and silver; and perhaps a third of its coal and gold. But Americans wanted to boast of their cultural progress too, and they were proud that their own authors like Winston Churchill (the
American
Churchill), Hamlin Garland, and Owen Wister were replacing Englishmen like Rudyard Kipling as best-selling authors. Most music was still imported, but black Americans were developing an indigenous musical culture with their “spirituals”;

O Lord, remember the rich an’ remember the poor.

Remember the bond an’ the free.

And when you done rememberin’ all ’round,

Then, O Lord, remember me.

Almost every bright promise of the progressive era seemed to have a darker side. The huge production was sweated out of men and women working sixty hours a week at subsistence wages in factory, farm, and home; out of children crawling through tunnels thick with coal dust. Blacks were coming to feel so hopeless about the “promise of American democracy” that the National Colored Immigration and Commercial Association in 1903 petitioned President Roosevelt and Congress for $100 million to carry American Negroes to Liberia. The same schoolchildren who were merrily playing Prisoner’s Base, Follow My Leader, and King of the Rock on the school grounds were often subject to the leather strap and ruler not only for “misbehaving” but for failing to keep up with their lockstep lessons in McGuffey’s readers.

Grown-ups also played their games. The annual report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, Secretary, offered a list of outrageous pleasures that, Comstock hinted darkly, were indulged in by the rich: indecent playing cards, roulette layouts, lottery
tickets, pool scorecards, gaming tables, dream books, dice, slot machines, watches with obscene pictures, “Articles for immoral use, of Rubber, etc.” Comstock reported that he had hired a horse and sleigh and driven through rural New England tracking down “devilish books” and “villainous” men.

Women, lacking the vote, jobs, and opportunity, were even imprisoned in their dress. Wrote Kathleen Norris of the conventionally dressed woman of turn of century:

“She wore a wide-brimmed hat that caught the breezes, a high choking collar of satin or linen, and a flaring gored skirt that swept the street on all sides. Her full-sleeved shirtwaist had cuffs that were eternally getting dirty, her stock was always crushed and rumpled at the end of the day, and her skirt was a bitter trial. Its heavy ‘brush binding’ had to be replaced every few weeks, for constant contact with the pavement reduced it to dirty fringe in no time at all. In wet weather the full skirt got soaked and icy. Even in fair weather its wearer had to bunch it in great folds and devote one hand to nothing else but the carrying of it.”

The most pervasive and relentless change was still occurring in the industrializing cities, as work, work habits, and work environment responded to ceaseless innovation. Urbanization and innovation fortified each other. Hosts of inventors and experimenters of diverse talents and specialties cooperated and competed with one another on the industrial testing grounds in the big cities. The “ingenious Yankees”—now Irish and Italian and German and Jewish as well—endlessly tinkered on the job as they strove to lower costs and improve and speed production. Machines were becoming more dominant even as they became less visible—as pulleys and drive shafts gave way to covered wires and tubes, and as safety shields concealed the power apparatus.

At fin de siècle, however, more than ever before during the nineteenth century, industrial innovation was becoming dependent on advances in science and basic technology. Decades earlier Karl Marx had contended that only in particular times in human history was science enlisted in key ways in the productive processes, even as science itself was dependent on intensive development of such processes. The very late nineteenth century was such a. time. Theoretical and practical developments in electricity exemplified change most dramatically, but new ideas burst forth in a variety of industrial fields.

And what enkindling ideas they were! At century’s turn, Albert Michelson was working on the velocity of light, with the help of an “interferometer” he invented. Thomas L. Willson, a North Carolina chemist, was producing acetylene gas. Frank Austin Gooch was introducing the rotating
cathode. Edward Acheson’s carborundum was tough enough to polish diamonds. Edward W. Morley determined the atomic weight of oxygen. Ohio physicist Wallace Sabine devised a reverberation equation vital to the study of acoustics. Americans were closely studying—and exploiting—pioneering work abroad: Guglielmo Marconi’s work on a wireless telegraph system; the discovery of X-rays by German chemist Wilhelm Roentgen; Lord Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of alpha and beta waves; Marie Curie’s identification of the elements polonium and radium; Max Planck’s quantum theory; Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure. Americans exported findings too: Michelson’s and Morley’s experiments served as a starting point for Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

Inventors were doing the most outlandish things, especially up in the air and under the sea. Simon Lake in 1894 launched Argonaut I, a small, hand-powered submersible. Three years later, he created Argonaut II, a gasoline-powered submarine with wheels for rolling along the ocean floor; and a year after that, John Holland launched his cigar-shaped submarine, powered by gasoline on top of the water and by electricity below. After Hiram Maxim failed to conquer the air with a steam-powered flying machine and after astronomer Samuel Langley built the first successful engine-propelled model airplane, bicycle makers Orville and Wilbur Wright launched the world’s first successful manned flight in a motorized airplane, at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Down on earth, after Charles and Frank Duryea had operated the nation’s first successful gasoline-powered automobile, in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1893, a host of inventors were feverishly perfecting improvements: sliding gear transmissions, steering wheels to replace the tiller, pneumatic tires, automatic lubrication.

Technology both stimulated and gained from advances in wide-ranging fields of science. Josiah Willard Gibbs at Yale and Charles Steinmetz at General Electric were working in sophisticated fields of mathematics. Geologists made key theoretical findings about glacial and other formations and practical ones about oil deposits. Astronomers were reaching farther out into the solar system, with the use of improved telescopes, photography, and a bolometer devised by Langley to detect extraterrestrial temperatures. Paleontologists—most notably Henry Fairfield Osborn at the American Museum of Natural History—were systematizing knowledge in the field through great finds of bones and fossil footprints. Anthropologists—especially Franz Boas and Clark Wissler—were taking sides between diffusionist theories stressing the geographical dispersion of Indian and other cultures, and “culture area” concepts focusing on interaction and integration within local cultures. In genetics, Thomas Hunt Morgan was doing notable work on heredity, embryology, and regeneration.
Medicine abounded in advances in anesthesia, radium and X-ray therapy, prevention, surgery, and a concentrated fight against a number of diseases, especially tuberculosis.